


The Soldiers

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Series: Voices From The Zone [3]
Category: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Genre: Accidental Death, Bribery, Career Ending Injuries, Corruption, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Morality, Dubious Science, Exploration, Food Poisoning, Gen, Government Agencies, Journalism, Military Ranks, Military Science Fiction, Original Character Death(s), Post-Game(s), Science Experiments, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 00:44:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8469265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: Interviewed here: Valentin Greshky, senior lieutenant; Vasily Mashenko, private; Nikita Dekanov, former private and machine gunner; Aleksandr Vorchik, doctor; Stanislav Golchuk, military stalker sergeant.





	1. About The Armored Personnel Carriers

So it was like this: I was just a young guy then, back in 2007, not smart enough for school but too smart to be a criminal. My parents were from Slavutich, they worked at that place before… well, you know. Lucky for us, though, they were vacationing in Odessa when the whole incident happened. And a year later, when I was in the army, I went there, too.

I don’t remember too much from the beginning, because of… you see these scars? [ _Points to the side of his head._ ] The anomaly got me right there, on my head, now I don’t remember too much anymore. The government pays me as an invalid. I can’t keep a job, can’t even really count money, that’s why I’m here in Zhitomir with my aunt Marya. She takes care of me and I do the chores and such. But no, that’s not what you want to hear about. You want my memories, the things I recall from the Zone.

Basically, after boot camp, I got my training, to read the Geiger counter. This was my only tool, really, other than your standard Kalash with a gas mask and a flak vest. They didn’t care too much about us. And really I was the only one who had the gas mask, even, because I was the radiation accountant. It was my job to check everything, record the readings, because when we caught stalkers we measured them too, and sometimes we could find where they’d been. There’d be drugs, money, weapons, anything you can think of in those places, but I was the only one who went, to check the stash. Because I had the gas mask and the Geiger counter. The others would wait outside, just smoking, having a quick snack. Only I knew that they were taking just as much dosage as me, they weren’t wearing masks. But that was a government secret, I could be locked up for warning them.

So I’d put on my mask, turn on the counter and go inside. Sometimes, it wouldn’t be so bad, just the occasional click and I don’t even need the mask. Those places didn’t usually have too much, because where I was there weren’t really rookies, just the ones who’d been there for a while and knew how to hide their shit better, you know? Maybe a couple boxes of shotgun rounds inside a pipe, or an old pistol in a fuse box. I’d write it down on paper, and then later in the computer, so that they could have all kinds of records to track this stuff. Anything I found was confiscated, and then I never saw or heard about it again. Officially, it would be taken for investigation or some such bullshit, but we knew they would really keep it, use it for their own things. Especially cash. I could never get away with it, no. But the lieutenants, the captains. They never even asked me to take readings on the bills before making off with hundreds of Rubles, Gryvnas and Euros at a time.

Food, vodka - now this was a different story, of course. I didn’t find this out until later, when I was in the Agroprom. We had to comb the little swamp, a soldier had gone AWOL and I was the radiation accountant on duty at the time. So it was me with this squad of greenhorns, I’d been in the Zone a few months but this was their first week, and a sergeant… ah, I don’t remember his name. The five of us went to the little swamp and we picked our way through. This was the only time all of us had masks, because of the gas anomalies, and we had to go through as quick as we could, before the filters could melt. So yes. Those were the orders, to quickly run through this toxic pit as thoroughly as possible and find a runaway private. You make sense of that.

We never did find him, but inside a trailer we thought he’d been staying for a short time… there was a bedroll, a tarp. Some sausages and a bottle of vodka, when I checked them, the Geiger counter was positively screaming, but of course we had to confiscate everything. So it was bagged up with a number attached, and I wrote everything down according to protocol. When I was checking the vodka, I noticed a chip in the glass, by the neck. Later, I did see this bottle again - when they were serving our dinner rations the next week. Just us grunts, of course, no officers. The officers got the best things, we were eating the same shit we found out in the Zone, it was so contaminated it was practically glowing, and that’s what they fed us.

I wrote home after that, my mother started to send me food from home. Tushonka, kvas, cookies. I had to split this nice food from home with my sergeant, then he wouldn’t rat me out, so sometimes I still had to eat the food provided on base, but still, I began to notice the difference as the guys around me got sicker and sicker. I wasn’t at a hundred percent myself, of course. The Zone really wears on you. But I got off better than them, because I ate food from home. [ _Shakes his head and is quiet for a long time_.]

The only other thing I really remember was after I got transferred to Buryakovka. Picture it, if you can think of this image: hundreds, thousands maybe, of these old vehicles, from the first accident in 1986. They’re all lined up, nice and tidy, KAMAZ trucks, Zaporozhets cars, fire engines. Bulldozers and military BTRs, Mi-24s, UAZ jeeps in military and civilian colors, Ladas. All rusted to shit, most without engines. Every day at dawn, it was me and two other guys, walking up the rows and checking everything. We couldn’t do it all in one day, but we were able to inspect the field all together in a week, I think. So it was me, Misha Sergeyevich and Sergeant Yakunin, them with their rifles and me with my detector. We had to inspect every vehicle, record its physical appearance and the current radiation level. I thought this was stupid until eventually someone explained it to me like this: “If a car has 20 rem today, but tomorrow you go to it and it has 80 rem, you’ll look inside and see something that was put there in the night. If a KAMAZ has 100 rem today, but tomorrow you go to it and it has 13 rem, that means someone climbed in and hid inside it, but washed out their hiding spot or brushed out the dust to protect themselves and you need to set a trap for the next one.”

So all day, I’d be going through these vehicles, with the two guys in Beril armor with respirators built into the helmet while I’m sweating inside a flak vest, a plastic smock and one of those air masks used by firemen. I had to wear the rubbers over my boots, and two pairs of gloves in case one pair has holes. And in the second month I’m there, I find seven grenades inside an APC with a low contamination reading. So I check the grenades too, and they’re clean. We write this all down and report it, but the captain in charge told us not to remove them so we could catch them in the act, thinking it would be some stalker who’d managed to fleece some things off us. So every night, three Spetsnaz would check the APC at random times, and every day the three of us would write down the contamination and the contents. Every few days something new would appear in there, from rifles to RPG warheads, and finally after a month we caught the guy. It was one of the noobs, even, who’d been bribed by someone to bring them this equipment. Which actually made sense, because no one else would be dumb enough to try hiding it in that place with us checking everything constantly.

That’s how it was in the Zone for me… I never saw the plant, or Pripyat. I was in a base or a checkpoint, taking readings and putting radioactive trash into plastic bags. And the whole time, while saying we’re keeping the Zone contained and stopping stalkers from contaminating the world… all around me, the army was just as criminal as the trespassers. Maybe, that’s just how it is. Maybe it’s like that everywhere.

  
_Private Anatoly Kruzhin, dosimetrist_


	2. About Laboratory Conditions

They sent me there two years and three months ago… no, three and a half, now. Of course they sent me at that time. My wife was pregnant… she didn’t want me to go, of course. But I told her that they were sending me so that I could get a promotion to assistant to the chief researcher, we’d have more money for the baby. She still didn’t want me to go, she’d give birth in two months and I would be gone for six. But I went anyway. I told myself: a promotion. Money, for my little daughter when she’s born. Our happiness is at stake. But also… also, I just wanted a rest, I think. Being pregnant was hard on our marriage, I just wanted a little time for myself, to mentally prepare myself but without having to deal with Katya. I would bury myself in work, and when I came home to Vishgorod my daughter would be born. That’s how it would go, and I told myself this over and over again, even as I was leaving and she was still crying and asking me not to go. I still wonder sometimes: why was she crying? For me, of course, it wasn’t too much of a big deal, it was part of my job, and I’d gone on research trips before… but maybe she’d somehow learned about where I’d be working. Yes. That must have been it. But of course she never told me.

For some reason, they had me report to some military people, in a different part of Kiev than where my research institute was. [ _The Radiological Defense Research Institute of Kiev burned down due to an electrical fire a year later._ ] It surprised me a little, they told me I’d be meeting my colleagues, and we work with the military… but these weren’t just soldiers, but something called military stalkers.

I asked them directly: “Where are the other scientists from my institute?”

“You’ll be told everything you need to know upon arrival, Dr. Kolchenko.”

“I see.” Well, no, I didn’t see. But of course I wouldn’t ever say that to them. “Are you escorting us then, gentlemen?”

To which they only repeated the same statement. And I thought to myself, this must be a very serious assignment. They had been ordered to tell me nothing. They checked all my things, told me not to bring clothes, because anything I wore in the Zone would be burned after for reasons of contamination. They told me I shouldn’t bring notebooks, pens, any of that, because all of my supplies were already waiting there in the mobile laboratory. In the end, all I brought was my laptop, and only after I bribed them, so that I could write mail to Katya. They issued everything else: green pants, a tan button shirt with a green tie, a white lab coat with a military insignia. If I’d had a stethoscope, I’d have looked like a Soviet army doctor. Apparently these were leftovers, in some warehouse somewhere. They were going to get rid of them anyway but decided to dress us up in them, so that we wouldn’t track anomalous soil or radioactive dust back out of the Zone. I got boots and socks too, and the other essentials - toothbrush, shaving kit. I even had a military field pillow as opposed to a regular one.

After that was my PPE, which they didn’t even measure me for. In our research institute, we were carefully fitted, so that when we were conducting clinical trials we would be safer. Nothing too baggy, or that might catch somewhere and rip, exposing us. And to keep us more comfortable so that we wouldn’t get careless. But in the army, it’s one-size-fits-all, for obvious reasons. So they gave me a shirt and tunic of gray tarpaulin, rubbers to go over my boots, thick protective gloves that were puncture-resistant but were split-finger and would reduce my manual dexterity. And of course the full-face respirator, which on field exercises was required to be attached to an SCBA to ensure my health and safety. This actually made me feel more concerned than I had been; surely, I wasn’t the top priority, this place couldn’t be so dangerous to warrant such measures. But I later found out I’d been wrong on both counts. I was desperately needed in the Zone, which was why they offered me the promotion as a condition. Many of the military’s own scientists had already died under mysterious circumstances, and they weren’t willing to risk more, so I had been duped into it. Of course, I was still important beyond this. The data they needed was essential, the military’s current hardware needed new measures to protect the electronics and vehicles. Somehow, they said nothing about troops, even though those very same men would be the ones ensuring my safety. Men are cheap. If one dies, they can draft another. But it takes time and resources to build armored personnel carriers or radio transmitters. So the value was placed on the materials and not the people. Even I was expendable to a point; if I became a risk in some way, they would not hesitate to eliminate that risk, no matter the cost. This realization also led me to believe they didn’t want my laptop travelling with me because it was a hazard to their security. I could leak anything, or it could be hacked. I could store data they didn’t want recorded and it would be much harder to redact than simply burning my notebooks.

They took me there by helicopter, with this squad of stalkers in matte black SKAT protective suits and armed to the teeth. And then here’s me inside this army gunship, with the special coatings over the outside of it and a pressurized cabin to keep out radionuclides, a short, stout scientist in flimsy CBRN apparel and even the stereotypical glasses. [ _Laughs._ ]

Before we could even leave the helicopter, there were more soldiers outside in plastic smocks and rubber boots, scrubbing it clean with special chemicals. But even though I’ve never been in the military, and had only been in this outpost for a few minutes, I can already see the lax protocol: they’re not wearing any facial protection or even their gloves, just their service caps and even smoking during this task. Their machine guns [ _sic_ ] were just dangling off one shoulder by the strap. [ _AKM-74s are technically classified as assault weapons._ ]

Once we were allowed to exit, they led me by the nose into a tent, and I could only question protocol even more. They had specifically instructed me: keep your work environment sealed, protect it from your contaminated PPE. You must always wear your CBRN suit outside of your work/sleep area, and wear your SCBA on field exercises. But my desk is right next to my cot, it’s a single-compartment tent. They’ve left the flap open for who knows how long, everything exposed to the supposed contamination. I spoke briefly with a dosimetrist about it, and he told me not to worry and that the only reason they even washed the helicopter was because some major was expected to arrive soon and they didn’t want to get reprimanded. So I asked him about my tent.

“Ah, don’t worry about it doc,no-one’s been in there for a month since the last guy got eaten by a pack of dogs. Shouldn’t be too dirty.” So then, I ask him about his job. “Well… they gave me this detector, right? They said to wave around the stick once in a while, and if the needle gets past _here_ on the dial, I have to report to the captain and see what he thinks.”

“Then you don’t know about radiation?” I’m very concerned, now, because it couldn’t be clearer that my career is currently in the hands of a group of incompetents.

“Well doc,it makes the detector click.”

I don’t ask him anything else after that, but instead go into the command building. I find the officer in charge, Captain Vostrokovenko, and he’s much smarter than the rest of them.

“You must understand, Dr. Kolchenko, we do not have the funds. There are other research groups here in Chernobyl, you may even see some of them. But they’re Russian scientists, with international funding. We are the military with almost no funding from our government to spend on this sort of thing. We have to arm ourselves better against the threat the Zone poses, but our country is broke. My men are not at fault.”

“Sir, this is not a workable environment to conduct experiments.”

He’s very honest with me.

“I know. I’ll do what I can to accommodate your research, doctor. But you must also understand that your research institutes also have international funding. There’s no labs here anymore. The best I can offer you is to close off the upper floor of this building and have my men set you up there.”

I was enthusiastic about this idea, but found out that they had no means to completely seal it. Everything was covered in tarpaulins, even the ceiling, secured haphazardly in some places by adhesive tape. My desk was moved from the tent, a couple of folding tables, a containment unit for samples. I felt a bit better about it when they washed everything with chemicals.

The food was all in tins and plastic at this camp, no fresh meals. Most of the time I had to eat it cold while recording my notes. After about a week I was already aching to go home; the constant howls from animals I never saw, lack of suitable equipment. The research opportunities were fantastic, but, being in a military setting, I was incredibly restricted. I gathered samples, wearing all of my PPE as I’d been instructed… the first two times. Afterwards it became clear that I would never be in a situation warranting it, so rather than fussing with everything, I left with the military stalkers, gathered my specimens, came back and showered. I wrote Katya at least once a week, describing the terrible laboratory conditions to her. As though they had even qualified as laboratory conditions. When I’d signed on, they’d told me I would be in a mobile bunker, completely secured, and that the military stalkers would deliver the samples and all I would have to do was conduct experiments. I’d thought I would collaborate with others from my institute, or someone from a different institute in Kiev, compare data and hypotheses.

After the first two months, Katya stopped writing me back. I remember because that was the first time I’d been allowed to venture into a contaminated area in person. The stalkers were tense, even though it was an uneventful outing, and I later discovered it was because one of their team had died there due to a defective filter. While I was analyzing my samples, the major they’d been expecting had finally arrived to do a check with the unit. He visited me in my little research space, apologizing for the conditions and promising me I’d be transferred to a new site within the next few weeks. (This, of course, never happened, and I was stuck there the entire six months.) That night, I wrote my wife, updating her on my work and asking if she’d had the baby yet. But she never wrote back after that, not once. Eventually I gave up.

The research was interesting, restricted though it was. I often had the chance to examine the mutations of tissue samples, attempting to decode the process of the mutations in question. It was much easier with flora than fauna, simply because plants are much more cooperative when extracting field samples. Often, the mutants brought back for my studies had been trampled, dragged and were riddled with bullets, leaving very little usable material. Once in a while I was presented with something unique, like the (mostly) intact brain of a bloodsucker or the claws of a chimera. Unfortunately, while I was able to gather immense quantities of data, I found nothing applicable to the military’s needs. This had been a roadblock for several years, and I had come no closer  to aiding them than any of my predecessors.

When my term was up, everything I’d used there was disposed of, as they’d said, and they scrubbed me with a chemical shower. I was triple-checked to make sure I was no longer contaminated. I went straight to the institute after that, with stacks and stacks of folders full of my findings, knowing that not a word of it was relevant to the intentions of sending me there in the first place. While I waited for the research director to finish organizing it so that it could be properly archived, I called my home - and got no answer. Confused, I waited a few minutes and tried again - no answer. So I got worried and called my parents, asking if anything had happened, but they had no answer for me. Then, I called Katya’s parents.

My daughter had been born fine, Katya was fine… and I would never see either of them again. She left me. She hadn’t wanted me to go, they said, and something about caring more for my job than my family. So I had accomplished nothing in my research, and had lost my reason for doing it in the first place.

It occurs to me now, of course: I had hardly ever written in my emails that I missed her. I had certainly never talked about returning home or wanting to. Instead, I wrote her about laboratory conditions and idiot soldiers. I see my daughter sometimes these days, but not often. Even still I’m buried under my work. I deserved to have her leave me, I think. [ _Silent._ ]

  
_Dr. Konstantin Kolchenko, Deputy Chief Researcher for the Kiev Research Institute of Radiological Defense_


	3. Soldier's Chorus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Interviewed here: Valentin Greshky, senior lieutenant; Vasily Mashenko, private; Nikita Dekanov, former private and machine gunner; Aleksandr Vorchik, doctor; Stanislav Golchuk, military stalker sergeant.

It was a very strange place. We worked with the scientists pretty often, guarding or running little tasks for them. Not in Yantar, of course. Those scientists were from Russia, internationally-funded. No, we were with Ukrainian scientists. The research institutes in Kiev, even though they themselves received some international funding as well, were supposed to be under our protection. Except these scientists, and I don’t know whether to be annoyed at or admire them for this, they would always want to collect the specimens out in the field, with one of my squads covering them. On the one hand, it was very irritating for me, the paperwork would give me headaches, especially if one of them bit it during the field exercise. But on the other hand - they weren’t cowards. They had real guts, they wouldn’t show the Zone their fear. Not like the international scientists at all. I don’t know if they were paid not to leave the bunker and have whichever contracted faction do the work for them, or if they were just used to hiding behind girls’ skirts and made it that way themselves, but it hardly ever happened that I saw an international scientist leave their little bunker. And of course it’s always in this clunky, dramatic NBC suit, though usually it’s the dogs that eat them before they even encounter a single anomaly.

There was this one time - last year, one of ours needed an escort to speak with one of theirs, but it was all the way across the Zone so a helicopter was used to move him. I liked this guy, we were great friends before he went home, his name is Fedir Shevchuk. I decided to ride there with him and the squad, just so I could follow the goings-on with these scientists. When we got there, I even had the opportunity to meet one of those pansies, he was wearing his suit even in the bunker, but with the hood down.

“Why don’t you do the work yourselves? You could go out, be a firsthand witness to these wonders and horrors, but you only choose to sit in here. How is that?”

“It’s not my job.”

He wouldn’t say anything after that.

 

*

 

It was always me, the entire rotation. For a whole year, it was always me, because they knew I’m a little slow. I didn’t even really figure this out until my rotation was over.

“You’re on latrine duty, Private.”

“You’re on guard duty for the next three days, Private.”

So that was it for me. I did all their shit jobs until I could come home. I never got to see anything interesting. Mostly I just remember the scrubbing of toilets until they looked fresh off the assembly line, or standing in a tower all night even though my rifle doesn’t have a nocturnal scope. Except once. I know this one thing, I saw it with my own eyes. My squad got sent to check some pit, apparently this pit hadn’t been there so they needed us to reconnoiter it. My squad leader, Sergeant Bondarchuk, was a greedy fuck and so he went first to check this pit, there might be artifacts, he said, and he wanted them. The very first thing that happened: Sergeant Bondarchuk got sucked right in, and chunks of him just flew out of the pit. I still smile when I think about it.

 

*

 

They had me operating the machine gun in the Cordon blockade for three months. It was annoying - whenever I pulled night shift, there were so many of them, like fucking flies. Most of them would come at night, because they weren’t stupid. They knew it’s hard to operate a PKM in the dark, even a mounted one.

So it was like this for three months for me, just shooting at flies, missing too often. But then of course, when I left the army and joined up with Duty, I asked them about it. They said that at least half the stalkers who came close to that blockpost got iced by the machine-gunner. So maybe I did my job better than I thought.

 

*

 

I remember 2006. Right after the accident, they had the ambulances running back and forth at all hours, even the ones from as far away as Kiev or Chernigov, where mine is. God. There were so many soldiers in our ambulances who needed to be rushed to whatever hospitals would take them, but nobody really knew how this had come about. These soldiers had all manner of injuries - thermal burns, chemical burns, limb dismemberment. One had an entire arm “degloved,” that is, the flesh ripped right off with only bones left. A few had been gored by animals, and these wounds were deeper and more ferocious than any others inflicted by animals, at least that I’ve ever seen. I think there were about three hundred who needed to be rushed out of there, and five of them lived to the end of the week. Three of those five ultimately lived, and today are completely crippled. This was horrific, I could barely realize what was happening, and of course the army wouldn’t tell us what “accident” this even was. After this travesty, I quit medicine. I just couldn’t do it after that. And only after I quit did I learn that the army hadn’t told us simply because they didn’t know themselves.

 

*

 

The clearest memory I have of that place is the first time I saw an artifact. Believe it or not, but I never even saw one until I became a military stalker, which is a good thing too because otherwise the radiation could have made my hand fall off. As a military stalker, we had the best equipment, we worked with scientists often and got the most interesting jobs. So I was wearing a SKAT suit, which was experimental at the time, and my squad was following after me. I say squad, but there was actually only three of them, and then me, the sergeant. In fact that’s what we were doing, we were field-testing these SKAT suits, and we had a scientist with us from one of the Kiev defense institutes. He was this very tall skinny guy, wearing this bright blue hazmat suit with a huge hood and an air canister, while we were in these very thick black suits made of ballistic material and coated with silicone to protect from the anomalies.

Obviously this was all unofficial back then, but we used our contacts in the Duty faction to have the concrete bath cleared out for us, because those chemical anomalies are the harshest ones, so that was where we tested them. And I found this little ball in there, which I was told later is called Firefly. I scooped it out of that toxic shit and showed it to the scientist, who got very excited. There were only two recorded specimens that any of the Zone scientists had managed to collect so far, and he was very eager to study it. So we got back to the helicopter with this little trinket, and he took all the measurements of the insides and the outsides of the suits per his directives. Before the SKAT suits were approved for use, we wore SEVA suits in camouflage colors, but they wanted us to have something with more protection from enemy stalkers. A lot of the time we were hunting down squads of mercs after our data, or ran into stray squads of Monolith who’d remained after the scorcher got shut down.

So we got back to the field outpost with the data and the specimen, and this scientist, who has several university degrees, is turning the thing over in his hands, poking at it - and of course accidentally drops it. So yes, several university degrees, but doesn’t know that artifacts can be “activated” and make new anomalies. I knew this at the time, there had been a briefing about it a few months prior, but I wasn’t really paying attention to him or I would have given him a smack and chewed his ass out for being such a dumbfuck. So this artifact got accidentally set off, and in spite of his hazmat suit he dies pretty much right there, because the thing bounced off him on the way down and so the anomaly spawned right in his chest. So now there’s no specimen, no scientist, just the data we already had and a puddle of toxic shit right in our field outpost.

When the military police did their investigation, though, they determined it was his fault for not having the artifact properly contained the way he was supposed to, and not my fault for not paying close enough attention. So we moved the field outpost, and now we have a new scientist under our guard. Maybe he won’t be as dumb as the last one.


End file.
